Google will update its Wallet product at its I/O developer conference next week, but will not include the physical credit card that the company had considered launching at the event, according to sources.

Sources said the scuttling — for now — of an extended effort to roll out such a card was announced in a recent memo that also included the news that Google Wallet head Osama Bedier was leaving the company.

Those who have seen it said the Google card had a black face adorned with the whimsical rainbow “W” of the Google Wallet logo, a standard magnetic stripe and the usual raised numbers of a credit card embossed on it.

The card was part of Google’s larger strategic goal to know more about consumer purchases, given the immense potential value of that mostly offline-level data for its massive online advertising business.

Google is already sucking in that purchase data on many fronts — between Google Play payments, Google Checkout on the Web and also advertiser payments — in addition to the dedicated Google Wallet project.

But Wallet has been hampered by its focus on and use of NFC technology, which requires certain phones and special readers to make transactions. Google tried to make that easier by introducing a “cloud wallet” last year that accommodated existing credit and debit cards, but it could still go further toward mobile payments at the register without using NFC.

The dumping of the physical card plan was certainly abrupt, since it had actually been built into the new update of Google Wallet, said sources, and some partners had thought the search giant might be demoing it at the event.

But Google still plans to update its Wallet rewards, offers and loyalty points with the addition of a larger group of merchants, making it a fuller competitor to Apple’s Passbook. Within the Wallet, Google’s “proxy cards” help it get access to data by witnessing transaction flow to merchants.

However, these improvements won’t be integrated with another Google effort that’s similar, Google Now, which already includes support for mobile versions of United Airlines boarding passes and Fandango movie tickets in its Android mobile operating system version. Sources describe the Google Wallet and Google Now teams as “siloed,” which has presented some level of difficulty.

At Google, it was thought that a plastic card might be a way to attract a lot of consumers quickly with a payment method they are familiar with and that is convenient to them.

And the company seemed to have chosen a somewhat conservative approach. Sources said Google wasn’t planning to go so far as to become its own bank or try to disrupt existing interchanges — which would really shake things up in the credit industry — or to get data directly from Visa and MasterCard, which wouldn’t go over well with any number of players in the sector.

But sources also said that Google CEO Larry Page abruptly killed the card launch plan after he was displeased with a glitchy run-through demo last week. He had long been skeptical of a physical card solution, with several sources saying he felt it did not press forward innovation as payments startups like Square have done.

And as those plans fell apart, Bedier, VP of wallets and payments, was pushed out of the company. Google confirmed the departure yesterday; it followed the internal shift of former local and commerce bigwig Jeff Huber to its Google X unit.

Today, the Wallet program is within Google’s ads and commerce division, run by SVPs Susan Wojcicki and Sridhar Ramaswamy. Of the two, Ramaswamy is the exec directly in charge of Wallet.

Another recent addition to the Wallet team is Nik Sathe, who joined at the beginning of this year after being VP of architecture and infrastructure at eBay’s PayPal unit, leading the online payments giant’s technology strategy. Google never announced Sathe’s arrival at the company, and did not reply to a request on Wednesday to confirm it.

Lauren Goode contributed to this report.

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Image copyright Red_Spruce

This is an exciting trend for consumer electronics in general, but we as an industry need to take a step back and realize that true connectivity extends beyond just the cloud.

Just because something is connected to the Internet, doesn’t mean it’s truly part of an Internet of Things (or as we like to call it at Qualcomm, the “Internet of Everything”). What’s unique about the Internet is its openness — the ability for one website to link to any other and leverage information in novel ways. Remember when the word “mashup” was all the rage in Web talk? Why was that? Because you just could. You could have one website leverage data and APIs from another website and mash that up to deliver a completely new, cool Web service, a la LivePlasma.com, Pageflakes.com, HousingMaps.com, etc.

So what’s the problem? Aren’t all these hot new connected IoT devices connected up to the cloud? Well, that’s the problem. We are oversimplifying the landscape. Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to one another, meaning they cannot benefit from the data, context or control of nearby IoT devices. That is why we currently need a separate app to control — and interface with — each connected thing we buy. This may be acceptable in the near term, but it cannot scale.

And therein lies the rub. The Internet of Everything should be the realization of devices becoming smarter from sharing context and information from one another. It should bring continuous computing to fruition, whereby information that matters to you can follow you regardless of the physical devices available. The Internet of Everything should enable a step function in UI design as nearby devices, appliances, sensors and intelligent software replace the need for human input. Smart application developers have already started using this type of real world physical input to automatically fill in information so that end users don’t have to (think GPS). Now imagine when the intelligence and sensing can start to come from beyond the phone itself — when information from your appliances, car or your garage door opener can provide this “contextual intelligence.”

To be fair, the Internet of Everything is not just about collecting data from other devices. It’s also about sharing control across devices. Today, most people think this simply means controlling a refrigerator or lights from a smartphone app. But that is just the beginning. Imagine if simple, low-cost devices like toasters can dynamically discover nearby devices that have advanced UIs (such as smartphones, TVs, computers and tablets). Suddenly, cheap appliances can offer beautiful, sophisticated interfaces. There is also a trend toward the ability to shift control from one device to another as you move through your day. Why can’t my SMS messages follow me around different screens in my home, even when my mobile phone is quietly tucked away in my purse?

And while we’re at it, let’s discuss the importance of connectivity itself in an Internet of Everything world. There is no denying that everything is getting connected. Whether it’s via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, ZWave, Ethernet, Powerline or 3G, it’s happening. But regardless of the underlying connectivity technology, ideally all of these devices should be able to discover, connect and talk to one another. The idea of each device connecting only to its own cloud service is worrisome. What happens if that particular cloud service goes down? What happens if external access to the Internet goes down? Does that mean that these smart devices lose all of their “smarts”? What about privacy? What if I want some devices to keep the data they collect locally on my personal network and not share it externally on the Internet? For example, do I really want my door locks or garage door opener to track every time I come in and out of my home and then send that up to “the cloud?”

These are the complexities often overlooked in many of the initial IoT devices today. But these complexities must and will be addressed, as the Internet of Everything scales and evolves.

Indeed, this vision requires openness and flexibility. It requires the ability to work across heterogeneous networks and heterogeneous devices. It requires the ability for devices to function and add value even when there is no Internet connectivity. The good news is that this future is not far away. And I can’t wait. Because frankly, with every year that goes by, I can use smarter things around me to make up for the intelligence I seem to be losing.

Liat Ben-Zur is a senior director of product management at Qualcomm. She can be found on Twitter at @liatbenzur.

Cloud image copyright Buslik

Doing so means more predictable revenue, less churn and, most of all, not having to sell customers on an upgrade every couple of years.

But moving to subscription-only, as Adobe is doing with many of its key products, is a bold bet.

Microsoft, by contrast, has been agressively creating subscription products such as Office 365 that make core products available for a monthy or yearly fee. At the same time, Redmond has been using its traditional packaged products as a way to tout itself as more flexible than cloud-only rivals such as Salesforce.com.

So why is Adobe going subscription-only with products such as Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign?

According to the company, it was just too hard on its engineering ranks to support products that get upgraded constantly as well as separate, packaged versions that only get upgraded roughly every two years.

“It’s actually very taxing on us internally to be maintaining two different code bases,” Adobe senior director Scott Morris told AllThingsD.

Adobe has been quick to point out that the move shouldn’t hurt its bottom line, but Morris stressed that the new approach also allows the company to deliver advances to customers more quickly.

It remains to be seen how customers, particularly slow-moving large businesses, react to seeing the software move to a more constantly changing service. Morris said that Adobe is creating a product that will allow the stodgiest of customers to stay on a particular version of the service (though they will still be paying on a monthly basis).

On the consumer side, Adobe plans to continue selling perpetual licenses for products such as Acrobat, Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, although Lightroom and Acrobat will also be included with Creative Cloud subscriptions.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

It’s been a long, hectic week for news — so it’s understandable if you’ve missed a couple stories on the technology side of things. Here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. In an essay in AllThingsD Voices, Jan Chipchase writes that Google Glass is the company’s “unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy … it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view.”
2. At D: Dive Into Mobile, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum announced that his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users.
3. Also announced at our mobile conference were Facebook’s updates to its iPhone and iPad apps to incorporate the “Chat Heads” from Facebook Home. As of Wednesday, those changes have started rolling out to users.
4. In an interview with Arik Hesseldahl, Workday co-CEO and Greylock Partner Aneel Bhusri said, “it’s the most disruptive time in 25 years” for enterprise, and that landing HP as a customer at Workday “gives people more comfort that the cloud is real.”
5. Peter Zatko, a computer hacking expert better known as Mudge, is leaving his post at DARPA, where he was tasked with helping government agencies fend off cyber attacks. Mudge’s next stop? Google.
6. If the netbook wasn’t dead already, it will be soon. New data from research house IHS iSuppli say shipments of the mini-computers will fall to zero by 2015.
7. Maybe you’ve heard of this small company called Microsoft? Windows Phone head Terry Myerson is casting his division as an underdog and going on the offensive against Google: “[there is] clearly mutiny in the Starship Android,” he said.
8. Facebook would love to put its new Home overlay on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Apple almost certainly doesn’t want it there. In this interview, Kara Swisher asked Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer and mobile head Cory Ondrejka to explain the two companies’ complicated relationship.
9. If you haven’t heard of Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi yet, you will soon. With 7.19 million handsets sold in 2012, Xiaomi president Bin Lin said the company expects to sell twice as many this year.
10. And finally, one of readers’ favorite quotes of the week came from AllThingsD’s own Walt Mossberg. He kicked off Dive Into Mobile by asking Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs about Firefox’s mobile operating system: “So … what the f**k?”

To stay on top of the latest, you should follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

One of Yahoo’s top women execs, Elissa Murphy, who is VP of engineering for cloud services, is departing the Silicon Valley Internet giant to become CTO and head of platform efforts at Go Daddy, said sources.

It’s the second talent raid on Yahoo by the company’s former product head Blake Irving, who is now CEO at one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. A few weeks ago, he grabbed James Carroll, who was SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo and who is now running international efforts at Go Daddy.

Murphy is perhaps the highest-profile woman within the tech ranks at Yahoo — besides its CEO Marissa Mayer — and is very well regarded within the company and outside it, too, for her computing expertise. She has overseen a great deal of code contributions to Hadoop, a technology essential to large-scale computing, first developed at Yahoo.

She is leaving the employ of platform head Jay Rossiter, for whom Carroll also worked.

Both Murphy and Carroll had first been hired into Yahoo by Irving.

(Update: Go Daddy confirmed the move, saying she will start May 6 as CTO and EVP of platforms there. “Elissa Murphy is more than just a top ‘woman’ in technology, she’s a top ‘person’ at the top of her field,” said Irving in a statement. “Elissa just plain rocks.”)

She seems to, as currently featured on a Yahoo careers page that touts “stories from our most valuable assets.”

Read the deservedly effusive text about her: “Yahoo!’s ability to retain a fun, startup-like feel is what attracted Elissa Murphy to Yahoo!. The VP of Engineering for Cloud Services says that this unique combination makes for a creative, yet fast-paced environment that is unlike anything else in the industry. ‘You want to build cloud systems but you want to do it quickly? This is the place you want to come to.’”

I have emails into all for comment.

But here’s Murphy’s classy memo to the troops on her departure, in which she praises Mayer, so we don’t need Yahoo PR to return our email for comment:

TITLE: So long!

Hi all,

I’m writing you today to share that I’ve just resigned my position as head of Cloud Services and Hadoop at Yahoo! to pursue a new venture. The time I’ve spent working and learning with you has been wonderful, and it’s not easy to say goodbye. I have, however, been presented with a truly unique opportunity to expand my scope of impact at a company with indomitable spirit, brimming with passion and hell-bent on changing the world.

From my first experience programming a PET computer in 4th grade and throughout my career, I’ve been captivated by the potential for technology to transform people’s lives. In my time with Yahoo!, it’s been adrenalizing to push the limits on one of the world’s largest-scale cloud infrastructures — opening the door for new advances in machine learning and predictive analytics. When I look back on the achievements I’m most proud of during my time here they all center on people and innovation. I am proud to have played a role in making Yahoo! a leading voice in Hadoop by launching the next generation of Hadoop at scale. I am proud that in less than a year alone we’ve been able to accomplish more with Hadoop, Storm, OpenStack and our NoSQL stores than many thought possible. I am proud that we continue to fight for open source and open ecosystems, even as those around us profit from further locking them down. And I am proud to have helped lead the effort to pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, to get back up, and to remind the world that Yahoo! still has a place in their hearts and homes.

But most of all, I am proud to have worked with so many smart and talented people. I feel honored to call so many of you friends, and I thank you all for the opportunity to work alongside you. If you want to connect, you can find me at here.

I want to give a special thanks to Marissa, who has brought a thoughtfulness and determination to Yahoo! that promises new hope for our culture. Marissa, I can’t tell you how much I have appreciated your sponsorship and counsel, and for your support as I move forward. I believe Yahoo’s brightest days are still ahead with you at the helm, and I’ll be watching and cheering for your success in the years to come.

So long everyone — I hope our paths cross in a future more near than distant!

Best,

elissa

[Photo from Yahoo Careers Web site]

While the Théâtrophone was an impressive invention in its day, the subscription model itself has a prolific and fascinating history of enabling innovation throughout the world. Subscriptions have helped companies pioneer new distribution models across a diverse set of business applications; all in the name of seeking efficient annuity revenue streams that outweigh the cost of production and distribution. From an end-customer “subscriber” perspective, the convenience of easy access or repeat consumption can greatly outweigh the incremental cost of subscribing.

Subscriptions have historically also found ways to take on greater social meaning through the signaling of a certain status by way of access to a secret society, social club or charitable organization. In the 1700s, by “subscribing” to become a benefactor to a charitable organization or society, individuals were able to achieve certain significance among their peers. Subscriptions to charity balls and full-seasons of theatre access were as much of a status symbol as they were convenient. Country clubs, yacht clubs, athletic clubs, fraternities and other private clubs have almost always been entirely member funded by way of the subscription membership model. Memberships, dues, donations and even tithing from the Catholic Church were achieved via scheduled “subscription” payments.

During the 18th century, the notion of subscription that we know today arrived when subscriptions to periodicals, magazines, books and theatre events became common. These subscriptions typically included delivery of the printed material and were sold for a specified number of issues or a period of time.

During the 1800s, the idea of pay-as-you-go subscriptions emerged to support the need for staple items such as heating oil, coal, milk, ice and even diapers to be delivered to your home. In Paris, a five-franc annual tariff was levied on all residents for their “subscription” to a hectoliter of drinking water per day.

Throughout history, we observe some interesting commonality across each of these examples. Whether we’re talking about subscriptions for the purpose of convenience, pay-as-you-go consumption, engagement or status, the underlying business driver has always been that subscriptions provide the ability to generate capital in the form of an attractive annuity revenue stream. From a financial perspective, companies that are able to generate a growing audience of subscribers producing predictable revenue streams are far more capital-efficient than companies that need to acquire, and then re-acquire, each customer interaction. (If you’re ever curious about this assertion, just ask yourself why so many insurance companies occupy the largest buildings across all major cities in the United States.² By definition, insurance is an annuity-based, subscription business.)

Fast forward to today. We are in the midst of yet another explosive expansion of subscription business models. From traditional media moving to digital media, to the rapid adoption of SaaS and cloud-based businesses, mobile and social products, applications and services are all careening toward some form of subscription-based offering. This is largely because the cost of developing and launching new businesses has declined to such an extent that it requires a very different level of up-front capital investment to chase these opportunities.

Why are subscription models everywhere today? The following intersection of trends is powering the recent appeal for subscriptions:

From the business perspective, there has always been a strong appeal in creating a predictable stream of revenue. Beyond that, the notion of maximizing lifetime value from existing customers is something that has always existed, but is now enabled through better visibility into activity. Traditional e-commerce companies like eBay have long focused on optimizing the “Triple A’s” — Acquisition, Activation and Activity. With today’s technology in place, we now have the ability to solve for all of these variables in a way that is not only more palatable to the end customer, but in many respects the optimization is couched in a way that is actually a benefit to the customer. (Think about the recent reminders you’ve likely received from your oil changer, dentist or even hair stylist that it is time for you to come back for your next appointment.)

Consumers have evolved a long way from the cable and magazine subscriber of yesterday as well. Today, consumers expect to have a range of choice in their offerings. They’ll commit to subscribe particularly if they have the ability to select from a range of feature/pricing options that best suit their own preferences.

There exists a psychological minimum. If a service is offered at a price level that feels low enough in relation to the marginal benefit that they receive, a consumer will subscribe. Conversely, they will elect to cancel if the marginal benefit wanes and is no longer worth the cost to continue subscribing. Managing the perceived value of any subscription product or service over time creates a relationship between the consumer and the service provider, each of whom seeks to maximize the value they are receiving from the other.

At the same time, the upfront capital investment required to launch a new enterprise service has declined to such an extent that it affords businesses a greater opportunity to test and learn as they go. As recently as 10 or 12 years ago, during the first dot-com boom, companies raised massive amounts of money not only to signal a coveted first-mover market position, but also to fund the huge amount of investment required to scale out a company. Today, we have cloud services and SaaS/PaaS offerings like Amazon Web Services and RackSpace.

The Web has become too fragmented to sustain ad-only revenue models.
Ten years ago, venture capitalists were inundated with companies seeking funding for ad-supported business models. Today, the Web is far too fragmented to support businesses seeking to aggregate massive ad dollars.

There has been a 100X reduction in the cost of software infrastructure within 10 years.
Here is an example: In just over 10 years, the “rented” application infrastructure model once offered by Kontiki (before it was called SaaS/PaaS) would have cost a customer approximately $100,000 per month to launch a business. Today, the same offering is delivered by Amazon Web Services for approximately $1,000 per month.

The cost of storage has plummeted 16X in the last 10 years.
Today, it costs you $0.085 per GB to store data. Ten years ago, it cost $1.39/GB. This decline in storage costs has created the opportunity for subscription-based file-sharing and backup companies like Box.net and Dropbox.³

The cost of Internet bandwidth “transit” has declined 75X in the past 10 years.
Entirely new business models have emerged due to the proliferation of inexpensive and ubiquitous broadband connectivity. This has allowed companies like Hulu and Netflix to have distribution to large markets at economically sustainable rates.⁴

Open-source software has eliminated the need for expensive licenses.
Ten years ago, companies aiming to deliver a service at scale were likely to sign up for expensive Oracle and Microsoft licenses. Today, startups have an impressive roster of free open-source software to choose from to run their operations.

On the Web today, the confluence of these trends is creating new markets and opportunities. The functional role of marketing has evolved to become increasingly data-driven.

Financial CRM allows the consumer to get what they want, and the business to provide a well-crafted migration path of high-probability options for cross-sell and up-sell options in the future. The management of this path for monetizing users post-sale has become an even more critical discipline for maximizing enterprise profitability than the sexy and creative brand-building efforts on which companies have traditionally focused.

All of these factors combined increasingly lead entrepreneurs to a similar conclusion. It is now far more efficient to offer products and services via subscriptions. Subscription pricing easily attracts customers, eliminates their purchase anxiety and, if designed well, keeps them happily paying over a longer period of time. Subscription models not only allow for attractive and efficient pricing, but also alleviate the need for a heavy-handed sales pitch. Ultimately, customers appreciate that they are in more control — always having the ability to upgrade their service, or to cancel and move on to something better.

Based in San Francisco, Dan Burkhart is the CEO and co-founder of subscription billing service Recurly, Inc. He was also an executive at eBay and NBC Internet.

Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty, who has also done high-ranking stints at other big companies such as Cisco and Microsoft, has been named CEO of enterprise cloud storage company Nirvanix.

She replaces Dru Borden, who will remain at the San Diego-based company as SVP of planning and development and who will also remain a director. Chrapaty will also remain executive chairwoman of the board of Nirvanix, which has investments from Khosla Ventures and Intel Capital.

Chrapaty has most recently been CIO of Zynga, but was also SVP of Cisco’s collaboration software unit and was a corporate VP at Microsoft. She was also president and COO of E*Trade Technologies.

In an email to me, Chrapaty wrote: “I had a great run at Zynga, wish the company and the team the best. But this is a really unique opportunity to leverage a company that is at the center of unstoppable trends (to cloud which hasn’t really affected Fortune 1000 storage yet) and a company that already has some great existing people and customers and investors you have known for decades.”

Zynga has seen a number of high-level departures and top management reorgs in recent months, as it seeks to turn around its recent rocky performance.

Zynga said that Chrapaty, who was hired from Cisco in 2011, will be replaced by Zynga exec Dorion Carroll.

“We thank Debra for her leadership and contributions to Zynga over the past years and wish her luck in her future endeavors,” said Zynga COO David Ko in a statement. “As one of our Zynga Fellows, Dorion has provided direction, leadership and management across numerous technology and products teams at Zynga over the past three years as well as being one of our most senior technology leaders.”

But the photos are sort of disorganized. Maybe it’s not even iPhoto. Maybe it’s another default photo-storage service or your go-to cloud app, like Dropbox.

The creators of a new service called Picturelife think they have a better backup solution.

Picturelife, which has been in the works for the past two years, is coming out of “stealth” mode today, showing off a new-new design and introducing video support in addition to storing photo files. The service is the creation of Nate Westheimer, director of New York Tech Meetup, OMGPOP’s Charles Forman (who dazedly walked into traffic after Zynga bought the casual game company for $180 million) and Jacob DeHart of Threadless.

Last fall, TechCrunch reported that the company raised $4 million in funding.

Picturelife’s approach is to work with all of the key photo apps, cloud services and social networks to allow for easy imports and syncing of photos across computer and mobile. As with most photo-storage services, photo files can be synced over Wi-Fi or by physically tethering a phone or camera to the computer.

But if you want to import an album from Facebook, you can do that, and share photos from Picturelife to Facebook and Twitter, too. Photos can be imported from Instagram, Flickr, DropBox, Tumblr, Foursquare and SmugMug as well, and won’t appear as duplicates in Picturelife.

The app’s search function uses natural-language tech to pull up photos and videos, so you can search by using a specific name or GPS location or just phrases like “photos from last summer.”

Westheimer says the service isn’t meant to replace other cloud-storage services — it’s supposed to work with them, offering a more organized photo-storage service and eliminating the need for local storage or a backup hard drive.

Picturelife costs $7 a month or $70 a year for 100 gigabytes of storage, and $15 a month or $150 a year for 300GB. It works on both Mac and Windows computers, and on iOS and Android mobile devices. The company plans to introduce terabyte options, as well as physical photo printing, in the coming months.

If truth be told, Jerry Yang never really disappeared from the Silicon Valley scene, even though he did leave Yahoo rather suddenly just over a year ago — resigning from the board and all other positions at the iconic company he co-founded with David Filo in 1995, and then going very quiet.

When I met him last week at the airy and newish office space of Ame Cloud Ventures, off Camino Real, he politely declined to talk about that Yahoo tenure and departure, although Yahoo and he are inextricably linked in the history of tech.

That’s because the former Chief Yahoo has moved onto the next stage of his career, which perhaps could be called Jerry 2.0 — a term he’d hate (and give me a hard time for using).

Still, in many ways, Yang has launched a new digital life by focusing on what made him interested in tech in the first place: Entrepreneurs.

“I feel like the thing I missed the most is what really early entrepreneurs were doing,” he said of his latest efforts, which have been well known among techies, even if Yang has never been one to toot his own horn much in general. “I’m not sure at all that I’m any good at this mentoring/investing business — that’s why I’m using my own money, and that’s why it’s not a career.”

Yet. Yang is calling his nascent investment business — he’s more than an angel, but not quite a VC — a “work in progress” that might morph into something more.

“There are no LPs — just me, myself and I,” said Yang. “I invest in things for the long term and have a long horizon and the flexibility.”

That said, via Ame — which means rain (雨) in Japanese and happens to be the acronym of the names of his wife and kids — Yang has already invested in about two dozen startups in which he has typically puts in $100,000 to $500,000.

Explaining the name, Yang said: “Without rain, there is no life.”

And it’s clear that Yang has been very busy dousing the startup sector with a wide range of interesting investments, including:

• dotCloud, an application platform for developers
• AeroFS, a private file syncing and sharing service
• Impermium, an Internet security offering
• Jetpac, a travel app for the Apple iPad
• Lex Machina, IP litigation data and analytics
• Tomfoolery, which is aimed at improving mobile enterprise apps

Yang said what informs his investment choices centers on the activity around mobility, sensors, cloud and big data that is enabling the next generation of computing.

“The main investing premise is the idea that devices are more and more network connected,” said Yang, who noted that data that is being collected is now at another order of magnitude than ever before. “The cloud has become the next-generation supercomputer, and the smartphone has provided the revolution to spur its use.”

To select from the companies he sees, Yang has only one young associate, Nick Adams, who codes, helps on deal mechanics, interacts with entrepreneurs and also has had extensive experience in Asia.

That has been important, since Adams also leads business development for China’s Cloud Valley, which is run by Edward Tian, one of Yang’s strategic partners there. It was with Cloud Valley that Evernote, the hot productivity app in which Yang is also an investor, partnered to create a business there.

Still, Yang is not completely alone. He has weekly meetings with another former Yahoo, Ash Patel — who started the $10 million micro-venture fund Morado Ventures, which means “purple” in Spanish, and has a lot of ex-Yahoos as investors — as well as individual angel and former Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem.

The trio trade ideas and deal flow, sometimes making bets together and sometimes not. Most of all, they leverage their time in the tech sector, both good and bad.

“I might not have better ideas, but I think my experience is unique and helpful [to entrepreneurs] and there is a value to my network,” said Yang. “I think what I have to contribute, besides money and a network, is that I am very candid about the experience I have had.”

That is indeed the case, because it is clear that Yang has a lot of wisdom to impart from his long and eventful history at Yahoo, as well as his stature as one of the Internet’s most important pioneers.

And, having covered the often circumspect Yang for much of that time, I would have to say that these days he looks about as energized, excited and enthusiastic as I have ever seen him.

“I’m truly humbled by the talent that’s out there, and at the same time recognize it’s a very crowded space,” said Yang. “It is not a career yet, but I’m having a lot of fun, and we’ll see.”

And here’s something else to calm your nerves: Our Top 10 stories from the week of Mar. 4:

1.) White House: It’s Time to Legalize Cellphone Unlocking

2.) Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Gets a Million-Dollar Bonus After Six Months on the Job

3.) YouTube’s Show-Me-the-Money Problem

4.) IBM Makes a Big Bet on OpenStack in the Cloud

5.) What Could Apple Buy With Its $137 Billion? About 18 Homes Each for Every Yahoo to Not Work At, and More!

6.) Former Top Yahoo Ad Exec Sues Yahoo, Accusing It of Trying to “Cheat” Him Over Acquisition Compensation

7.) Heads Turn as Microsoft Shows Off 3-D Scanning Techniques

8.) Loose Lips: Yahoo M&A Head Told Employees Company Looking at Two “Significant” and a Half-Dozen Small Buys

9.) The Disappearing Interface

10.) Why Google Thinks Two Music Subscription Services Are Better Than None

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

But while the gaming hardware was notably absent, consumers did get a glimpse of some key upcoming game titles, as well as Sony’s plans to offer cloud gaming, more integration with PS Vita, and even some concept games that use Sony’s motion-sensor device, the Move.

AllThingsD sat down with Jack Tretton, the president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, to discuss the future of the gaming console — as well as why Sony didn’t show theirs last night — and Sony’s strategy of “doubling down” on its hardcore gaming audience.

I think it was Sony’s Andrew House who said right off the bat that the living room is no longer the focal point of gaming. Can you further explain this idea and how it relates to the future of the console?

My interpretation is that the living room used to be the only place that gaming lived. Now it’s the primary place, but it’s not the exclusive place. So I still think that sitting on the couch in front of the TV with a powerful console like PlayStation is the nerve center of the experience, but it doesn’t end there — it extends out into the world, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on smartphones and tablets and dedicated devices like Vita. It’s a little bit scary if you’re a core gamer, because you feel like if you go to sleep, you might miss something.

A good portion of tonight’s event was on game titles, not as much on cloud streaming, mobile or entertainment. Is Sony PlayStation doubling down on its position with hard-core gamers?

Well, I think the console has evolved beyond strictly gaming devices. People expect multimedia capabilities, and that’s certainly a given. But what we’re all about, in our DNA, is the gaming and the gamers. You buy [PlayStation] because you’re a gamer and you enjoy playing games, and you use it for other purposes, but we’re first and foremost about that core gamer that eats, sleeps and drinks the gaming.

I think there are more gamers today than there have been ever before, and the core is really strong, and loyal.

But at the same time, at least in the U.S. market, Microsoft has had the best-selling console for many months in a row now, and they’ve taken a media-heavy approach. What’s your thought on their strategy?

We look at the market in worldwide terms, and every market is extremely important to us. The facts are, we debuted the PlayStation 3 at $599, which was an extremely steep price barrier for a lot of consumers. And we debuted a year after Microsoft, but on a worldwide basis, we’ve sold the same, if not more, devices. I think we’re at 77 million sold right now — it’s basically splitting hairs. Despite all that, our message has been extremely well-received around the world.

Plus, if you look at multimedia services, we’re the No. 1 streaming device when it comes to Netflix, not Xbox. They’re trying to — I don’t really know what they’re trying to do. I’d rather not comment on their strategy. But we’re trying to say we’re all about the gamers and, by the way, there’s multimedia out there. I think the people who tuned in to see this live streaming event, from all around the world, were watching to see the gaming.

Will the new console cost $599 to start?

I certainly hope not. I think we’re very proud of what we delivered with the PlayStation 3 in terms of technology, and that we were able to enhance the features while still reducing the price to $249. But I think our goal with this is to debut at a more consumer-friendly price. But we haven’t made any final decisions about what the price will be at launch.

Why didn’t we see the new console today?

I guess when I think about the console, you open it up, you look at it, you certainly look at it when you insert a disc, but for most people, it’s behind a cabinet or on a shelf somewhere and you spend all your time looking at the screen. And we wanted to show people the screen. There will be multiple opportunities to share the look of the console between now and the launch. We just didn’t choose this first event as the time to show it.

But is it ready?

I mean, we’re certainly capable of showing playable game content, but we don’t have a mass-production box that we can bring out and pull out. That’s still in development in terms of final specs and design.

It wasn’t a big surprise today that there were some cloud-gaming announcements, given Sony’s acquisition of Gaikai. But cloud gaming, especially when it comes to graphics-heavy stuff, can suffer some technical difficulties. How does Sony plan to manage that?

I think that all credit goes to Gaikai, and all credit goes to Sony for recognizing the strength of Gaikai and acquiring them. We’ve cerainly had cloud storage, but Gaikai seemed to be well ahead of anybody else that we saw, and were doing things we didn’t think were possible. So I think the acquisition allows us to do things that are more in line with consumer expectations; allow them to play the games they expect.

And PS4 can play those games. I’ve certainly seen it done that every game we’ve ever published, up through PS3, is playable with no latency. I don’t know if we’re saying we’re at that stage yet, but we think we can get there in the near term.

1.) Salesforce CEO Benioff Invites Laid Off Yammer Employees to Work for Him

2.) Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

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6.) A Big Year for Apple’s iPhone in India

7.) Bill Gates on Philanthropy, Steve Jobs and the Microsoft Product That Never Was

8.) Yes, Intel Is Building a Web TV Service (A Box, Too)

9.) The Cloud’s Dirty Little Secret

10.) Apple MacBook Pros With Retina Display Get Faster, Cheaper

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

So a gadget like Oculus Rift might be just the thing that’s needed to keep game hardware feeling fresh.

Shown off today at the D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif., the Oculus Rift is a virtual-reality headset that immerses the wearer in the videogame world playing around them.

Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe joined AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka to demo the headset, which was connected to a large computer monitor for audience viewing. Peter good-naturedly agreed to wear the Rift headset, showing a reaction comparable to the one he had during this erotic e-book demo last year at D: Dive Into Media 2012.

Iribe explained that the Rift could work with games ranging from shooting games to “my little pet games.” Right now, the company is working to get thousands of kits into the hands of developers.

The CEO said the Oculus headset represents the first time gamers can be fully immersed in a 360-degree videogame environment. He expects play time will increase gradually over time: “We’ll see when it gets to getting lost in the Holodeck.”

SoCal-based Oculus, which was created by Palmer Luckey, first launched back in August as a Kickstarter project. Oculus’ initial goal was to raise $250,000. It raised $2.4 million instead.

As explained when we first saw the Oculus Rift at CES, the Rift isn’t a computing device itself, and the games aren’t streaming inside the headset, so it needs to be attached to a computer to work.

Unlike past attempts at virtual reality (like, most notoriously, Nintendo’s Virtual Boy), the Oculus Rift works because “the hardware’s finally ready,” Iribe said.

The current asking price for the Rift is $300, but Iribe is hesitant to say when it will become available to consumers.

So, what did Peter think? “I’m a little queasy, but it’s awesome,” he said.

“You definitely don’t want to be drinking too much,” Iribe responded.

With reporting by Eric Johnson.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130212/oculus-rift-shakes-up-gaming-with-virtual-reality-headset/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20130128/the-next-step-for-computing-the-storage-fabric/ http://allthingsd.com/20130128/the-next-step-for-computing-the-storage-fabric/#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2013 00:50:37 +0000 Albert "Rocky" Pimentel http://allthingsd.com/?p=289437

Image copyright J.D.S.

Do you care about losing your wallet? Or is it what’s inside your wallet that’s more important?

When you phrase the question that way, the answer becomes pretty obvious. You worry about your driver’s license and credit cards and, in particular, the information contained on those pieces of plastic. Wallets and credit cards are really just vehicles for valuable data.

At the same time, those vehicles come in handy when you’re in the checkout line at Target.

This two-part relationship is an essential element in the evolution of what you could call the storage fabric. The storage fabric consists of the ability to access data nearly anywhere at any time, as well as a superstructure of hardware, software and services to deliver and manage it. It’s much like your relationship with electricity — you probably didn’t buy a diesel generator to get electricity into your home: You plugged into the grid.

In the ideal storage fabric, consumers and businesses will store oft-needed information on their smart phones and notebooks for rapid access and better performance. Services like Amazon Cloud Services, Dropbox, or our own eVault, meanwhile, will archive your personal history, filter out redundancies and unnecessary information and gather new material that you might find interesting.

Applying for mortgages, sharing medical information and confirming educational and employment history will be far easier because your history — and the history of those you’re dealing with — will be at your fingertips through secure connections and permissions. Information brokerage services like those being created by Reputation.com will allow you to selectively give your information to marketers.

Your personal devices and the cloud, along with being plugged into the fabric, would also continually study your habits and act in the background to keep you up to date. If your phone falls into a storm drain, you can just switch to a new one: It will have everything you need. If the cloud stalls or there is a security breach, you’re not locked out.

Apple, and companies like those listed above, has started to take initial steps with services like automatic syncing, but we’re still a long way away. Some of these services are for hardware customers only. Sharing can require several steps. In the future, companies will install local storage islands around cities for smoother, faster streaming. Software will be required to help you navigate, prioritize and edit the growing stack of information.

It is easy to forget, but superstructure — hardware — is a crucial part of the equation to make everything easy. Google renamed its document service GDrive for a reason.

A movement toward a storage fabric like this represents the next logical step in the history of information. For the first five thousand years of civilization, information was largely tied to physical media: scribes carved directives from the king in tablets and third grade teachers resorted to the copy machine for homework assignments. The advent of digital and magnetic technologies in the second half of the 20th Century marked a watershed moment, because they dramatically eliminated a substantial portion of the physical bulk and legwork required to store information. Documents and datasheets could be edited on the fly. Just as important, archiving and managing data became fundamentally easier: file clerks, once a substantial portion of the workforce, suddenly were as common as blacksmiths. Still, only finite copies of most documents existed: things could easily be lost.

The Internet took things a step further by breaking the relationship between information and its physical media. Hotmail, the one-time king of email services which Microsoft recently transformed into Outlook.com, probably deserves some of the credit for convincing customers about the benefits of remote access. When Hotmail was founded in 1996, email was still a thing: you downloaded software onto your computer to receive email and all of your messages were stored on your laptop or desktop. With Hotmail, users could suddenly easily access messages anywhere, not just from a particular PC. Consumers no longer owned the drives and computers where their messages lived. The information was theirs, but the superstructure wasn’t.

Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook soon followed. From a user’s perspective, you could make infinite copies and get unlimited access to anything. This split, however, introduces a new set of challenges. Users are no longer responsible for the health and maintenance of the systems that store their data: they expect companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google to do it for them. And while these companies have created state-of-the-art data centers and backup systems that function at incredibly high levels of reliability, reality sometimes intrudes. Crashes occur, and instead of one person in a cubicle complaining about a lost file, it’s a whole swarm of angry, impatient consumers. Security demands will grow as sensitive information shifts finally from paper to active files.

Remote access also potentially means a gargantuan increase in data packets. To keep networks humming, service providers will have to develop caching, recovery and de-duplication strategies to minimize the volume of traffic and the distances individual bits have to travel.

Finally, managing the massive and never ending increase in structured and unstructured data has its own inherent challenges. Which data goes where? When does the consumer want to access that data and how? Companies like Seagate and many others will look to tackle that challenge and deliver on this concept called the storage fabric. Consumers won’t have to worry about the back-end technical gymnastics and complicated algorithms that are managing their data. They only need to focus on a single view of their digital world, regardless of their device.

The hard work, however, will pay off. It will lead to what people think of when they think of the “cloud.” Not the reality of millions of machines anonymously churning away. Instead, it will just be the data, which is more valuable than any individual device.

You won’t have to think about a storage fabric. It will just be there.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130128/the-next-step-for-computing-the-storage-fabric/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130124/making-a-case-for-network-virtualization/ http://allthingsd.com/20130124/making-a-case-for-network-virtualization/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:18:24 +0000 Ben Cherian http://allthingsd.com/?p=288410

Image copyright Johannes Kornelius

At the beginning of this century, server virtualization burst onto the IT scene and changed the way modern IT organizations think about server hardware. The basic concept behind server virtualization is that multiple “virtual” servers can be run on a single physical server. This consolidation of servers resulted in much higher utilization of physical servers, which dramatically reduced the capital expenditure (capex) costs required to provide IT services. Using fewer physical servers also lowered power, cooling and datacenter space requirements. Other indirect benefits were increased agility, since the IT department could provision a server in minutes or hours versus the weeks and months it used to take to procure, set up and turn on new physical servers.

By all accounts, server virtualization adoption has been extremely successful. One look at VMware’s revenue numbers and there’s no doubting this fact. In the early 2000s, the predominant question that many in IT asked was, “Why should I virtualize?” Today, the predominant question you’ll hear is, “Why can’t the servers be virtualized?”

The rise of self-service IT

We’re going through a similar paradigm shift today with self-service IT. Internal business units want the breadth of services and speed of provisioning that they can get outside of the firewall through cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services. In response, forward-thinking IT departments have been changing their traditional role into one that looks more like a service provider and have begun offering a full menu of solutions to their constituents. One of the staples on the menu is a private Infrastructure-as-a-Sevice (IaaS) cloud offering. A few concrete business drivers underlying this offering are:

• Fine-grained control over the infrastructure which lowers risk and increases ability to deal with compliance concerns
• A lower cost when compared to external services like Amazon
• Lowered operational expenditures with regard to provisioning resources
• A much faster provisioning speed than internal IT typically offers
• Better disaster recovery options
• Increased application availability

Elements of an IaaS cloud

There are four elements needed to build an IaaS cloud: a cloud management system, compute (also known as the hypervisor), storage and networking. The cloud management system handles all the provisioning and orchestration of the underlying compute, storage and network components. Examples of such systems are OpenStack, Citrix CloudStack, Eucalyptus and VMware’s Vsphere product.

For compute, storage and networking, cloud architects look for solutions that linearly scale out (adding new capacity incrementally) rather than scaling up (buying bigger devices). This approach keeps costs low by consistently maximizing utilization. Even if cost weren’t an issue, this scale out approach is highly favored because it increases availability and reduces service interruptions of your cloud. In a well-thought distributed IaaS design, a single large device would never be an integral component of your cloud. Adhering to distributed design philosophies is a key reason why cloud service providers can consistently achieve very high levels of availability.

Another item cloud architects look for are products that can integrate with the cloud management systems so that they are fully automated. Scaling out and automating compute is a known problem and all the cloud management systems solve it with ease. As for cloud storage, there are now great distributed options like Ceph, SolidFire and OpenStack Swift that linearly scale out and can be easily automated.

Networks are hard to provision and scale

These newly minted cloud architects are beginning to realize something that those in the cloud service provider business have known for a while. Network devices weren’t designed to be automated, and they definitely weren’t designed to be provisioned at the granularity and high-churn rate than IaaS clouds demand of them. Also, some network devices, instead of linearly scaling out as demand increases, tend to adopt a scale up model.

Networks aren’t flexible enough for cloud requirements

A common use case for an IaaS cloud is disaster recovery, which often requires the recreation of complex network topologies. This can be problematic because that typically would require the physical network to be purpose built for that specific disaster recovery scenario, thereby eliminating the cost benefits and general purpose nature of the IaaS cloud. Another very common use case is migrating existing applications to the cloud. Many applications are reliant on very specific network design patterns. These apps would pose problems if they were moved to the cloud and might even have to be rewritten to fully operate in a cloud environment

Enter overlay-based network virtualization

Overlay-based network virtualization is a technology that allows cloud users to provision virtual network devices such as virtual switches, virtual routers, virtual firewalls and virtual load balancers. These virtual network devices can then be connected to VM’s as well as other virtual network devices to create complex network topologies. Since these virtual devices live in software, the underlying network (a.k.a. the physical network) only needs to be an IP network which allows all the compute hosts to see each other. Two leading examples of overlay-based network virtualization solutions are Midokura’s MidoNet and Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform. These particular solutions have an added benefit that they are designed to be fully distributed; that means the scaling model is linear and can be scaled out incrementally as demand increases. They are also integrated with cloud management solutions so that virtual network device provisioning is automated. Those who spent their lives deploying production clouds think of overlay-based network virtualization as the best way to handle networking for cloud environments.

Predictions and prognostications

Now it’s time for me to put on my Nostradamus hat. Server virtualization adoption has grown at an extremely fast pace since its debut and has fundamentally changed the IT landscape. The next phase is widespread self-service IT adoption, and consequently, the proliferation of IaaS clouds. These concepts, as well as the technology behind them, will become essential to how the modern enterprise will deliver IT services. Because overlay-based network virtualization solves the very real problems stated above, it will soon become the preferred method of handling cloud networking. Now is a great time to start researching overlay-based network virtualization to better understand how it will fit within your IT future.

Ben Cherian is a serial entrepreneur who loves playing in the intersection of business and technology. He’s currently the Chief Strategy Officer at Midokura, a network virtualization company. Prior to Midokura, he was the GM of Emerging Technologies at DreamHost, where he ran the cloud business unit. Prior to that, Ben ran a cloud-focused managed services company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130124/making-a-case-for-network-virtualization/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130123/hey-big-senders-yousendit-bulks-up-mobile-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20130123/hey-big-senders-yousendit-bulks-up-mobile-app/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:00:22 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=287448 If you’ve ever transferred obnoxiously large files that your regular email account won’t let you send, there’s a good chance that you’ve used YouSendIt.

But YouSendIt doesn’t want to be just about sending anymore. It’s aiming to chip away at the cloud storage market, where Dropbox and Box are household names. Just last week, it acquired Found for its file-searching technology. Now YouSendIt is launching a newly redesigned mobile app.

The new app includes sorting functions meant to make file-finding easier, and provides the ability to send photos and videos straight from your phone without saving them to the cloud. It’s also heavy on swipe functions for prompting different actions or for renaming files.

The app is available for iPhone and Windows 8 devices. It’s free to download, although big senders will be prompted to pay $10 or $15 a month for “pro” or “pro plus” access.

To be sure, YouSendIt’s cloud-based competitors also have a variety of mobile apps that complement their desktop services. Dropbox has long had apps for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Kindle Fire; SugarSync offers apps on iOS, Android and Windows and also comes preinstalled on a number of hardware devices, like Samsung “smart” TVs and select Lenovo PCs.

YouSendIt says its apps are focused more on productivity (there’s a “quick sign” feature that lets you save and use your e-signature, as one example), and aren’t just mirroring the file-sharing structure that already exists on the Web.

Around 70 percent of YouSendIt’s paying users are corporate customers, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse has said he thinks it’s a fine time to get in on the “BYOD” trend.

AllThingsD boss Kara Swisher spoke to Garlinghouse last week about the company’s plans to become more “cloud-nostic,” as well as Garlinghouse’s goal to change the YouSendIt name sometime in the early part of the year. The name is too synonymous with simply sending, he has said, and is not indicative of a bigger cloud storage service.

Looks like a lot of combinations of “box,” “cloud,” “sky,” “drive,” “drop” and “sync” are already taken, so it will be interesting to see what YouSendIt comes up with in its next incarnation.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130123/hey-big-senders-yousendit-bulks-up-mobile-app/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130122/depending-on-the-cloud/ http://allthingsd.com/20130122/depending-on-the-cloud/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:12:01 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=287583 Q:

What is the best way to store a large number of photos without relying on cloud systems?

A:

If you have more photographs (or any other large files) than you would like to store on your computer’s hard disk, but don’t care to use cloud storage, the best option is an external hard disk.

Some of these are networkable, which means you can connect them to your home network and access the photos via Wi-Fi from multiple PCs, Macs and other devices. This is called Network Attached Storage.

Q:

I’m a senior in high school preparing for college this fall. The shared family computer contains a lot of stuff that is mine, including music, Word documents and photos. What would be the best way to transfer these to the laptop I end up getting? Would a service such as iCloud (since it is an iMac) work best for music and then transfer Word docs and photos through a flash drive?

A:

That would work, especially if your photos and documents amount to a relatively small amount of data. But, if your laptop is a Mac, there is an alternative.

Apple builds in a utility that appears during setup and will migrate data files, settings and apps from an older Mac, either over a cable or a wireless network.

This might be faster and more complete, especially if your stuff is the bulk of what’s on the iMac. After migration, you could always delete anything you didn’t want.

Email your technology questions to Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130122/depending-on-the-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:30:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=285484

YouSendIt, the file-sharing and enterprise collaboration company, said it had bought a small startup called Found Software that helps users find and discover a wide range of data across many devices and cloud services.

The Campbell, Calif.-based YouSendIt, whose newish CEO is former Yahoo and AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse, said it had found a “cloud-nostic platform” — no, really, it did coin that term — to increase the mobile capabilities of its services.

YouSendIt did not disclose the price it paid for San Francisco-based Found, which was co-founded by Stephen Brady, Vijay Sundaram and John Mitchell. They will all join YouSendIt.

But the acquisition does give the company some differentiation in search and discovery in the fast-growing data storage and sharing space, as it seeks to compete with powerful rivals from Dropbox to similar offerings by big companies like Google.

I talked to Garlinghouse about this, as well as why he went to YouSendIt, and how it might be rebranded going forward, in the video below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130107/seven-more-questions-for-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon/ http://allthingsd.com/20130107/seven-more-questions-for-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon/#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:30:42 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=282755 It has been more than two years since we first came across Okta, the startup that aims to make it easy for companies to manage who can and can’t sign in to all the cloud computing services they use. The company has been going places since then.

Late last year, it landed a significant round of venture capital funding, a $25 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital. Prior investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and Floodgate all participated, too. The round nudged Okta’s total capital raised to north of $52 million.

The funding announcement was accompanied by a larger vision statement about what Okta aims to achieve. In that statement, CEO Todd McKinnon argued that “identity is central to how work gets done in a business,” meaning that Okta aims to be a lot more than the company that makes it easy to manage account credentials.

I recently had a chance to catch up with McKinnon in New York to talk about what he meant by that, and to flesh out what he sees happening at Okta in the coming year.

AllThingsD: You’ve just landed a big C round investment, but it coincided with the publication of a big vision statement. What is the vision statement all about?

McKinnon: I think people misunderstand a lot of things about our company. The first thing they think is that we’re just for cloud stuff. And CIOs and other people thinking about building the next generation of their IT environment don’t want two identity systems. They don’t want the old that barely worked, and the new one that doesn’t talk to the old one. They want one. And we’re positioned to build that. We’re trying to be more aggressive at communicating that.

Initially, everyone understood the identity layer to be a simple manner of managing all the credentials for using cloud services. Now you’re reaching into more on-premise products. How much of a pivot is that for you?

The vision has always been about a single identity layer for everything. The reality is that we started as a little cloud company; the most receptive buyers were companies doing a lot of cloud stuff. So that was how we communicated about ourselves to the marketplace. And now the product has matured to a point where we can really communicate about the vision, about a unified way of managing identity.

Give me some sense of momentum. Funding is certainly an indirect indicator, but what else is going on?

We have, in the last year, added 140 enterprise customers, which brings us to more than 200. We’ve added 300,000 end users. Those are paid enterprise-user seats, which means there’s real money behind them, and that has brought our total user footprint to 500,000.

The obvious thing that people start wondering about a company like yours is when you might be ripe for acquisition, or if you’re going to go the distance. I can think of a handful of cloud and software companies, like Salesforce.com or Oracle or IBM, that could be logical buyers. What are your thoughts about this?

We’re building the identity layer for the next generation of corporate IT. Everyone is going to want to do something like this. You saw Saleforce’s announcement that they want to do this, too. This is clearly something strategic. The value of our product comes from it being in the hands of a neutral party. Our customers want Switzerland; they don’t want someone like, say, a Salesforce.com or a Google, because it would be beholden to their own apps.

I’m reminded that David Sacks, the CEO at Yammer, used to say something similar about being Switzerland when asked about being acquired. Look what happened there: Yammer is now part of Microsoft. Couldn’t the same thing happen to you? And what would it mean if it did?

It’s different for us. If you never connected Yammer to anything, it could be valuable. If any one of our integration partners, say, Jive or Box, or any one of those companies cuts us off, the value of the product goes down. So it’s different in that regard. The Yammer platform is still valuable with no integrations. Our platform is not. So I think that’s a big difference. It gets back to the funding. We’re venture-backed. At the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholders, and we have to build enough momentum in the company to have the outcome of not being acquired, to be superior in the minds of my shareholders than the outcome of being acquired. Clearly at Yammer, they couldn’t do that.

Now you jumped ahead to my next question. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff announced a plan to create a competitor to Okta, and we talked about it at the time. How far, to the extent that you’re aware, has that effort come along? Are you worried about it?

Anytime a big company announces they want to compete with you, you should be worried. They said they’re going to build a product, and that’s definitely going to be a competitive threat. The reality is that Salesforce is doing a lot of things, and they’re spread very thinly. I don’t think they’re going to make the kind of investment necessary.

What will you do with the money?

The big thing is to build out the product. Right now, it’s robust, scalable, used by tons of customers live. But there’s a lot of work to do on it. We have 2,000 connectors to different applications and services, but there’s more than 2,000 of those. We need 20,000 connectors and then we need 50,000. We need to really expand that number and connect to everything. Every device, every application, every platform. So we’re going to use the money to build the product in that way. If a customer has an application that’s built by some regional provider, with maybe 50 customers in some niche business, to a customer in a certain vertical, that application is very important. They don’t want to have some kind of one-off situation where they can sign in to everything they use, but not this one thing. And it’s not economical for us to go out and build the connector ourselves. So we need to have a platform where someone can go and build the connector themselves and share it with anyone who might need it. The thing about our platform, because it’s based in the cloud, is that it can be maintained and supported over time. There’s also some exciting things we can do with helping companies collaborate with each other. So if two companies are using Okta, they can connect their systems across firewalls more easily. That’s the identity network we’ve been talking about.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130107/seven-more-questions-for-okta-ceo-todd-mckinnon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130104/twilio-names-new-chief-revenue-officer/ http://allthingsd.com/20130104/twilio-names-new-chief-revenue-officer/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2013 18:00:06 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=282443 Telephony software start-up Twilio announced its latest C-level hire on Friday, naming former Salesforce SVP Bobby Napiltonia as the company’s new chief revenue officer.

Napiltonia comes most recently off his smart-grid start-up eMeter, which was sold to Siemens in 2011. Previous to this, he did a four-year stint at Salesforce as a senior executive, where he drove up revenue for the company’s Channels and Alliances group.

His focus as he starts the new gig? Developers, natch, Twilio’s bread and butter. Over the past few years, the company has scaled its stable of developers served from a few thousand to around 175,000, handling on average a million API calls per day.

Napiltonia’s hiring rounds out the company’s C-suite of execs, after Twilio tapped Say Media executive Lee Kirkpatrick to be CFO in May of last year, along with former Jive Software exec Lynda Smith as CMO. Co-founders Jeff Lawson and Evan Cooke, of course, remain CEO and CTO, respectively.

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